Lady Chatterley in Italy

...The real novel begins not so much with the unmarred idyll she has given us as with its consequences...

...How can Arcangelo agree to this preposterous arrangement...

...What about Neddy...

...By making Arcangelo over to look and behave "like an Englishman of the most casually elegant sort," she has falsified him until he becomes nothing more than the sentimental and hackneyed prototype of what a provincial young British matron would expect in an Italian poet-lover...

...She has also glossed over or deliberately removed the essential and often irreconcilable psychological, emotional and cultural differences, contrasts and conflicts which 'bedevil and intensify the passions of men and women of different nationalities who fall in love...

...There now comes to us from England a slight but curiously intense first novel, Exchange of Joy, which tells what happened to a conventional Englishwoman during a year spent in Italy with her two little children while her husband was off on a business trip to Australia...

...How can she keep hidden from him the secret of the birth of Arcangelo's child...

...Yet Celia must have had, beneath her placid exterior, an active and vivid subconscious life, for when she first met in Tuscany the wearily handsome Sienese poet, Arcangelo Tolomei, she "recognized him at once" as "her dream grown into daylight...

...Lastly, she leaves her readers with too many questions unanswered and unresolved: How can Celia honestly go back to the unsuspecting and unloved Neddy after her Italian interlude...

...Is he so obtuse that the change in Celia, however subtle and artfully concealed under silence, would go unperceived...

...Reviewed by Helene Cantarella Former chief, Foreign Language Review Section, OWI Motion Picture Bureau The emotional impact of Italy on Anglo-Saxons has caused a lot of ink to flow since the war...

...Falling rapturously in love, she capitulates with pagan fulsomeness and uncharacteristic absence of guilt or remorse...

...For a year, Celia and Arcangelo live together in unclouded bliss, have a child and, despite the pain of parting, decide for the good of all to go their separate ways...

...Stone, and Arthur Laurents's play, The Time of the Cuckoo (lately filmed in Venice under the title of Summertime), to have some idea of the diversity of treatment accorded this provocative theme...

...Gentle, stable, devout and "absurdly ordinary," as she had once said about herself, 25-year-old Celia Coke was a thoroughly domesticated wife and mother whose potential urges toward personal ambition, restlessness and defiance had been thoroughly dissipated by the prickly humor and rigid set of values of her staid architect-husband, Neddy...

...But she has reduced the real core of the story to a flimsy shadow of what it might have been if treated seriously and in depth...

...Can she really give up her baby so easily for adoption by the implausible old Oxford don who serves as deus ex machina when someone is needed to remove the damaging evidence once the liaison between Arcangelo and Celia ends...

...Miss Quigly is a writer of undeniable sensitivity whose forte lies in conveying the atmosphere of breathless and sustained ecstasy in which women of Celia's stamp live when in love...

...Miss Quigly begs the point when she closes her story with the comment that "it was not neat and ended: there was no solution and no conclusion...

...One need but mention Tennessee Williams's novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs...

...It has, of course, been explored in Italy, too, most recently perhaps by Mario Soldati, whose novel Lettere da Capri won last year's important Strega prize...